STASIS Digs For Maybe, Possibly Kickstarter Victory

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It’s going to be a highly stressful four days for Christopher and Nicolas Bischoff, who are presumably right now staring at the big $98,927 number on the STASIS Kickstarter page and praying it’ll tick just a little higher, up to the magic $100,000 that will secure the gothic sci-fi pointerclicker’s funding and future. 56 more people backing the entry-level Digital Edition tier would do it, according to my calculator. Having done some perfunctory maths, I am now exhausted and must sleep for a while. I’ll return later.

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mmmfffgrrahah NO DON’T TAKE MY ELBOWS grrnnnarrrr what where I am? What year is this? Who’s the president?

Ugh. Sorry, must have dozed off there for a minute. STASIS, was it? Ah yes. Pretty good shot of making it, I’d have thought, but there have been a few Kickstarter horror stories where games fall just short of their goal and end up with diddly-squat.

While $100,000 does seem a lot of money to ask for a game whose demo suggests the meat of this Alien’n’The Dig-inspired meal is already in place, what does exist is impressive enough (especially in terms of atmosphere and tone) that I’m certainly not going to begrudge them it.

Since we last posted, they’ve brought Fallout composer Mark Morgan onboard for music duties, and they’ve released this new bait’n’switch trailer to stare at:

I’ll be very surprised if this doesn’t make it. And even if it doesn’t, at least we’ll have a new cautionary tale to bore people with when we hold forth about Kickstarter.

Yep. Barely 1% left with four days left to go was kind of a lock, even if the inevitability of the trend didn’t hold up. Kind of makes one question the exaggerated melodrama…

And as it’s currently approaching midnight in Australia, one suspects that the author, not being Australian, might not be quite so sleep deprived as implied. Unless, of course, Alex has just pulled a Monday night all-nighter…

It’s for stuff like this and the many other wonderful death animations in several of Sierra’s early games that makes me miss dying in PNC games. I get the whole design point of not killing the player (LucasArts was great for this), but at the same time, you can still kill the player in entertaining ways and not really punish them for it by just letting them go back to the point before they, say, picked their nose. The original Dead Space, to take a modern example, had some fantastic death scenes such that it was fun to just run up to stuff and see how Isaac would die next. Then… you know… the game became a franchise and started sucking.

The death animations in Stasis are pretty damned cool. I have a model of John with internal skeleton, organs, and lots of mushy stuff to play around with.
Dead Space has certainly been a big influence on those deaths, as well as the Space Quest series!

That said, the suicides are completely optional. I noticed so many people tried either the glass, or the neural drill on themselves when playing the Alpha ( link to stasisgame.com ), it just seems wrong to not give them a surprising result!

You know it’s a special game when dying can be as worthwhile as simply surviving. I think of Clive Barker’s Undying and Jedi Outcast when people talk about amusing/varied deaths. Undying had a different death animation for each enemy and Jedi Outcast had the player disintegrated when shot with a certain weapon as well as getting maimed in various ways by a lightsaber.

Rootin for you and your team, Chris! These two games clearly speak to me and I sincerely hope there is some serious success with both because it means there’s going to be more people venturing into this area. No need to feel honored, tho; I’m nobody. haha

“Who’s the president?” Uuuhhh… shouldn’t you be asking “who’s the prime minister” instead? Let’s keep things British, shall we? It’s also more unusual and thus more fun to ask who the current prime minister is.

It’s well deserved, as it’s a great looking game and concept. It’s one of the only times I actually found myself wishing I had the money for one of the more insanely-priced reward tiers as that model of the ship is just gorgeous.